Last year Microsoft shelled out $26 billion – yes, that’s twenty six billion dollars – to take over LinkedIn. Just think about that for a minute – $26 billion is greater the entire Gross Domestic Product of more than half the countries in the whole world.
And why would Microsoft do that? LinkedIn’s total revenue in 2015 was a paltry $670-odd million. So Microsoft is hardly interested in LinkedIn for its profits.
Nope. Microsoft is prepared to make the biggest purchase in its 40 year history to get hold of LinkedIn’s 350 million members. And most of that 350 million are high-value professionals of some kind.
Microsoft recognises that the real money is in the list of customers.
So how does this relate to your small salon or spa in Downtown Anywhere? For exactly the same reason – the real money is in your list of customers, clients and prospects.
Last week, veteran WSM member Nicole Panayiotou, owner of a successful salon in the Victorian country town of Sale decided she wanted to boost sales for June, and at the same time clean up her large database of several thousand clients and former clients.
Here’s what she did:
1) At my suggestion, she shot a short video on her mobile phone, sent it to one of my team at Worldwide Salon Marketing, and we loaded it up onto her salon’s website. You can see that video here.
3) At the same time, she used her database – her list – to find another 400 such ‘missing in action’ clients with mobile phone numbers, and sent them a text message that read as follows:
“Want a FREE $50 voucher? Click the link to redeem it! We miss you at Blush x. http://www.beauty-salon-sale.com/we-miss-you – Reply stop to opt out.”
The link in the SMS took recipients to the new video on her website here, and under the video, a simple form to fill in and get the gift voucher.
Results?
“I sent 150 letters, got 3 clients back off the first letter. Sent 400 texts, got 11 opt outs and 7 clients back in! Still got more to send so extending it (the offer) thru till end July. Great chance to clean up data base so I’m happy.”
Now, before you dismiss that as a poor result, think about it; with a simple, easily-implemented promotion using just a tiny section of her existing list of clients, she resurrected ten ‘missing in action’ clients, with the chance to turn them once again into regular buyers. At say, $1,000 a year per client, it’s a cheap way to regenerate $10,000 a year revenue.
That’s the value, and the money, in a well maintained list. And that’s why Microsoft is spending $26 billion to get hold of one.
One of the greatest frustrations for many salon & spa owners is NO-SHOWS! They’re expensive, time-wasting and profit-sapping. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this webinar, recorded with successful Brisbane salon entrepreneur Anita Clements of Twisted Desire, watch and listen carefully as Anita explains how she eliminated no-shows forever – and discovered many other ways to take money from clients UP-FRONT.
Quotes
“I feel I’ve moved from Hairdresser to Business Women”
“You have my back”
What changes have happened?
” The biggest change is now my VIP events are profitable now – they were not before”
“My Staff are now interested in marketing where as before they were not – we’re making money now”
Taking deposits “I was very nerves to begin with but now with any VIP night we take money up front”
How did you implement taking deposits? ” We started doing this in January, we took a big hit because of not taking deposits. I felt very nerves about taking money off existing cleints. So we started small and any new cleint that is having any chemical treatment has to pay a deposit. We have a script and we have no problems with people paying them. ”
What did that do to your no shows.
“We have almost no no-shows now. We have got rid off all the time wasters who would book and not turn up”
“Our salon is now full of good customers”
What happens when people say they do not want to pay a deposit”
“Well it just means that we don’t get bad clients”
“If they don’t want to pay a deposit they can always just pop in and if we are not busy we will see them without a deposit”
“They tend to spend more money when they pay a deposit because the bill on the day is less”
“its made us a little more exclusive than the salon down the road”
“Its almost been a year and we’ve not had one person not show up or not call us”
“We take deposits for VIP events – if you pre pay you get a great package on the night (no discounts just added value) and mostly we are getting money from our existing cleints”
“The last VIP night we made $3,000 just from 2 packages and they could not wait to book in”
“We are doing the local Christmas market and take a stall and we are selling vouchers there at the festival”
“We’re also do the Christmas tree thing off the membership site – we don’t change a thing just run it straight off the system”
“We also did an Events and pre-sold Mini Membershps and made $9,000 – then I got scarred and pulled the pin but I should have done more”
“We don’t need bank loans anymore we just pre sell a mini membership – it just becomes a game, its no longer any struggle!”
It’s less than 2 weeks in to 2014 and our Worldwide Salon Marketing members are already out of the blocks with a roar with emails and phone calls coming in to our office from excited salon owners telling us about their successful campaigns.
This morning I spoke on the phone with Maree Hoare, of Red Hair in Palmerston North. Maree joined us just one month ago and has shown immediately what it takes to be a successful marketer of her business.
She hasn’t sat around waiting for the phone to ring, instead she’s got straight down to business, is creating her own success and taking complete control of her business.
When Maree opened her salon this morning she noticed some gaps in the booking system later in the week. So armed with the tools she needed to fix that problem, she opened up her computer, visited the members only template website and found an SMS example that she could adapt for her own salon.
She sent the message out to just 400 people of her SMS list and within 30 minutes had no fewer than 12 bookings.
“With schools being on holiday it gets a bit quiet around this time of year in Palmerston North, I need to keep my team busy and so at this late stage it seemed a text message to my clients would be the quickest option to fill the gaps later in the week. It took me a few minutes to put the message together from the examples on the website and then I sent it out and within minutes the phone was ringing hot! The system says the SMS’s are still being sent out so I am sure I will get even more calls than the dozen we have already had in the last half an hour. But I am really happy with the result.”
The hair offer Maree sent out by text was for $79. Given that a text will cost about 10c per message that’s a $40 cost for a return so far of $948. I would call that a great return on investment.
And the message also saw at least 2 long lost clients make a booking in the salon.
Since joining WSM in December, Maree has already put in to action steps to help her work more as a marketer on her business. Could you imagine earning $948 in 30 minutes if you were cutting someones hair or doing a facial? Not likely unless you are the hairdresser to David Beckham. So Maree is already seeing the value of her time spent marketing rather than being a technician cutting hair.
And in addition to Maree’s amazing SMS campaign she also launched her mini memberships last week which she has already sold 7 bringing in and extra $1400 in income.
A massive congrats to Maree for her great start to 2014 and we can’t wait to hear more from her as the year progresses.
If you are not a member of one of our WSM programs but want to kick start 2014 the way Maree has done then click here now to apply and one of our team will be on the phone to you immediately. Or call one of our worldwide offices to speak with someone now.
Salon And Spa Marketing: Dumb And Dumber-Why The Big Beauty Businesses Are Struggling, And How Small Independent Salons Can Laugh All The Way To The Bank
Despite what you read in the newspapers, it’s not ALL bad news.
From the Big End of town to the tiny end, there are plenty of reports indicating that the “recession” is patchy, uneven at best, certainly NOT a uniform slide into economic oblivion.
McDonald’s is reporting a massive 80% increase in net profit in 2008 over 2007. Spooked by the relentless reports of Armageddon on the TV news, it seems folks are hitting the fast food joints to save money on meals (and no doubt pile on some fat to carry them through the economic winter!)
Maccas made $4.3 billion in ’08, compared with $2.3 billion in ’07.
In our little world of entrepreneurial salon & spa owners, it’s a similar story, all over the world.
In Scottsdale, Arizona, Body Solutions Laser & Skin owners Dr Tim & Kanna Reilly report a staggering 500% increase in sales in 2008 over 2007, using a simple system of done-for-you direct response marketing tools and ‘sales thinking’ strategies they bought from Worldwide Salon Marketing in August 2007.
“It was a revelation,” says Dr Reilly, whose chiropractic clinic morphed into a skin care clinic over several years but had always bled them white. They were on the verge of giving up and closing their doors, until they ‘got it’ just in time and joined the WSM Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program.
IC member Rechelle Watt with her business award…a 40% increase in salon sales in 2008
Then there’s Inner Circle member Rechelle Watt, of Lamonde Hair Face & Body in New South Wales, Australia. While the majority of salon owners whine about how tough things are, Rechelle and hundreds of other Inner Circle members is going from strength to strength.
In ’08, a 40% increase in sales over ’07, according to an email from Rechelle this week.
(Members Only: want to copy what Rechelle’s done? Log into the Members Only section and navigate to ‘Getting New Clients – Hair’ and you’ll find the newspaper ads and the text messages Rechelle used to generate an extra $109,509 in sales in 2008)
And they do it using simple, hard-nosed, “ugly” copy-intensive emotional direct-response marketing, contained in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit and the coaching they get as Inner Circle members – not the unaccountable, ‘imagey’ expensive branding-style-lets-hope-some-of-it-sticks marketing typically rolled out by big dumb companies using other people’s (eg shareholders’) money.
Big companies in the beauty business are as guilty of pouring useless advertising dollars down the ‘branding’ toilet as anybody else at the top end of town.
Take the giant Regis Corporation, owner of such brands as Cost Cutters, Super Cuts and Hair Club for Men and Women, Regis spend gazillions last year in an up-market makeover of its newly-purchased 635-store Trade Secret chain of salons, attempting to ‘European-ize’ them as a means of selling more bottles of beauty glop.
It was clearly money down the drain. This week Regis folded its Trade Secrets tent, announcing it was ‘selling’ the brand to Premier Salons Beauty Inc.
The word ‘selling’ is a euphemism for actually giving it away. Regis will get precisely zero, nada, zilch for the ‘sale’, instead picking up some tax credits on all the money it’s flushed down the drain on its worthless branding exercise.
All of which just goes to show, dear salon owner, that the ‘geniuses’ running these billion dollar product suppliers and salon chain owners are certainly no brighter, and in many cases a lot dumber, than you the small independent salon owner.
So take heart. If hundreds of our small-time independent salon Inner Circle members can actually increase sales in this deep recession, so can you.
If, of course, you’re equipped with the same marketing & sales tools and coaching.
Note to US and Canadian salon owners: successful IC members Dr Tim & Kanna Reilly of Body Solutions in Scottsdale, AZ are Worldwide Salon Marketing’s first USA franchise, and are handling all coaching for new North American members as of January 2009.
Salon Marketing: How A Text Message Made a HUGE Difference
There’s a saying I like that goes like this:
”Little Hinges Swing BIG Doors.’
Inner Circle member Emma Grossman of Escape Day Spa in Sydney discovered the profound truth of that just last week… and took action which turned a dismal week into a blockbuster at her day spa…
Here’s how Emma (left) explains it in this interview – and, for Worldwide Salon Marketing members only, the actual text message Emma used to such devastating effect….
“Last week (Tues – Fri) was our quietest week ever, we were only about 20% booked and I was going to tell some of my girls to take time off. Last Wednesday I decided to text to just 800 clients (we have 12,000 on our database so 800 to me is very small) with a special offer – and all I can say is WOW! We are now 120% booked out, I had to bring another therapist in and we have so many people on a waiting list.
It (the text message) cost us $120 and brought in 26 more bookings valued at $2,859 in facials only (not including retail and additional services).
“Next week we’re sending out a similar offer to 5,000 clients!”
“..we are 120% booked…”
Note for WSM members: the actual salon marketing text message Emma used can be found in a separate email with the subject line ‘Emma’s text message’.
Check out these salon business building resources from Worldwide Salon Marketing.
Want My Rich Salon Owner eBook and Audio For Free?
Last year Microsoft shelled out $26 billion – yes, that’s twenty six billion dollars – to take over LinkedIn. Just think about that for a minute – $26 billion is greater the entire Gross Domestic Product of more than half the countries in the whole world.
Last week, veteran WSM member Nicole Panayiotou, owner of a successful salon in the Victorian country town of Sale decided she wanted to boost sales for June, and at the same time clean up her large database of several thousand clients and former clients.
3) At the same time, she used her database – her list – to find another 400 such ‘missing in action’ clients with mobile phone numbers, and sent them a text message that read as follows:
It’s less than 2 weeks in to 2014 and our Worldwide Salon Marketing members are already out of the blocks with a roar with emails and phone calls coming in to our office from excited salon owners telling us about their successful campaigns.
